The Islam scholar Daniel Pipes appears to have a radically different take on the 9/11 Commission report from Amir Taheri (see post below). Pipes approves of the report for two reasons. First, it identifies the threat to the west correctly, something few are prepared to do:

'In contrast to those analysts who wishfully dismiss the Islamists as a few fanatics, the 9/11 commission acknowledges their true importance, noting that Osama bin Laden’s message “has attracted active support from thousands of disaffected young Muslims and resonates powerfully with a far larger number who do not actively support his methods.” The Islamist outlook represents not a hijacking of Islam, as is often but wrongly claimed; rather it emerges from a “long tradition of extreme intolerance” within Islam, one going back centuries and in recent times associated with Wahhabism, the Muslim Brethren, and the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb.'

Second, Pipes says the report identifies correctly what the west's goal should be:

'The commission carefully distinguishes between the enemy’s twofold nature: “al Qaeda, a stateless network of terrorists” and the “radical ideological movement in the Islamic world.” It correctly finds the first weakened, yet posing “a grave threat.” The second is the greater concern, however, for it is still gathering and “will menace Americans and American interests long after Usama Bin Ladin and his cohorts are killed or captured.”American strategy, therefore, must be to dismantle Al Qaeda’s network and prevail over “the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism.” In other words, “the United States has to help defeat an ideology, not just a group of people.” Doing so means nothing less than changing the way Muslims see themselves, something Washington can help with but cannot do on its own: “Tolerance, the rule of law, political and economic openness, the extension of greater opportunities to women — these cures must come from within Muslim societies themselves. The United States must support such developments.” '

I guess Taheri wouldn't quarrel with that, as far as it goes. The problem seems to be, though, that the Commission doesn't tell us how the west should do this. In particular, as Taheri says:

'...the United States would need, and can find, allies, including among a majority of the Muslims who have been the first victims of Islamic fascism and its ideology of terror. The commission has no suggestions about how to engage in those battles, who to choose as allies and who to identify as neutrals. The commission makes an even bigger mistake. By speaking of "political grievances" it tries to explain the Islamists within the parameters of classical logic. Having accused the administration of lack of imagination, the commission, is itself unable to imagine a conflict that is not political in the normal sense of the term.'

I agree with Taheri that the Commission report was platitudinous, although I agree with Pipes that it performed a valuable service in articulating the nature of the threat so clearly. But what strikes me most of all, as someone writing in Britain, is that these issues are not being aired, let alone debated, in Britain at all. The mainstream media here, along with the intellectual and political class, are silent: silenced by ignorance, prejudice and fear.

Are any Americans really taken in by this garbage?

'Senator John Edwards has hailed John Kerry as a decisive and strong leader in a keynote speech to the Democrats' convention in Boston...In keeping with a key theme of the convention, the vice-presidential candidate spoke of Mr Kerry's experience in Vietnam as proof of his ability to be a wartime leader. Mr Kerry's crewmates had seen him save another's life, turn his boat around and "drive it straight through an enemy position and chase down the enemy to save his crew", Mr Edwards said. US veterans of the war in Iraq "deserve a president who understands... on the most personal level what they have gone through", he said.'

The relentless pounding of military metaphors, complete with Kerry being pictured yesterday against the backdrop of gun turrets (subtle, huh?), is such an obvious, indeed desperate, propaganda ploy to present him as something he is not -- strong and decisive, and therefore a staunch war leader. But the truth is that, on the contrary, Kerry is dangerously inconsistent and opportunistic, as Gerard Baker devastatingly reminds us in the Times:

'He was a strong voice in favour of free trade for years, but now says he would reconsider open trade deals with other countries. He voted against war in Iraq in 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s tanks had stormed through an American ally’s territory. But he voted in favour of war in 2002, on the controversial ground of pre-emptive need. Most damagingly of all (according even to some of his own advisers), having voted for the 2002 war resolution, less than a year later he voted against a measure to give the necessary $87billion funding to finance continued military operations there. His explanation, like all fateful cover-ups through history, was worse than the original crime: “I actually did vote for the $87billion before I voted against it,” he said.

'On social issues, Mr Kerry has strongly supported abortion rights, but, as a Catholic of sorts, has also professed his own conviction that life begins at conception. He has supported affirmative action, but warned people of the damage it can do to social cohesion. He wants better relations with allies, but will ignore them if he feels it necessary. Nothing captures Mr Kerry’s ambivalence on the great issues of the day for a puzzled electorate as much as this simple fact: he was both a Vietnam war hero and one of the leading members of the antiwar movement.'

Baker charitably ascribes all this to genuine intellectual doubt rather than opportunism. Whatever his motives, however, Kerry's vacillations bespeak a character flaw which would be disturbing in a leader at any time, but in a period of such global peril might well prove lethal.

A fascinating take on London Mayor Ken Livingstone's recent guest of honour, Sheikh Dr Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who denied claims that he was an extremist and claimed to be in favour of dialogue and peace. But according to Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, the former editor of the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, this is the opposite of the truth. He says of Quaradhawi:

'Two weeks ago, he announced on his program ["Sharia and Life" on Al-Jazeera] that he is against the Jews and against conducting a dialogue with them, and that they are all iniquitous. The f ollowing are his words: "The iniquity of the Jews, as a community, is obvious and apparent. Let me explain: The West, I can say about some of them [i.e. westerners] who are iniquitous, and others who are not iniquitous. And it is possible. But iniquity on the part of the Jews is great iniquity, grave iniquity, iniquity that is incomparable and overt. Therefore, when it was suggested to me that Jews would be participating in the dialogue in the upcoming interview, I rejected this. I said no, we should not conduct a dialogue with these [people] while their hands are stained with our blood."

'When it comes to political matters, Al-Qaradhawi represents the utmost degree of extremism, to the point that he recently ridiculed the Organization of the Islamic Conference, when he openly expressed his desire and that of his revolutionary friends for political leadership, saying, "We want the ulama to represent the Islamic nation [i.e. the OIC does not represent the Muslims]." He also demanded [that the Islamic nation should obtain] the nuclear bomb, saying, "In order to shed this backwardness, we must produce a nuclear bomb, as did Pakistan, and as perhaps Iran is doing. However, we are besieged so that we will continue to be weak." '

As for the thought that maybe Ken was simply unaware of his guest's real views, another writer, Iraqi emigre Hassan Assad, not only dismisses this but offers a brutally uncharitable interpretation. Islamists, he says, deluded themselves that they had defeated communism in Afghanistan whereas this was actually accomplished by Christians and Jews. When the Islamists then turned against the west, their former Marxist foes joined forces with them. Hence Ken's (literal) embrace of Quaradhawi:

'The mayor of London understands very well who his guest really is… However, he helps Al-Qaradhawi deny the accusations against him because he shares his hostility for that civilization that removed from the world the totalitarian Marxist ideology, represented by the Soviet Union and its satellites.'

Mayor Ken -- the man newly re-embraced by Tony Blair as the Labour lamb returned to the fold.

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Dore Gold, author of a seminal book about the links between Saudi Arabia and terror, provides a magisterial overview of the key points of importance that have arisen from the recent rash of intelligence-related reports. On the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, he says this:

'What emerges from these intelligence details is that Iraq had an ongoing and cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda that intensified after 2001. The Butler Committee even added: "some reports also suggest that Iraq may have trained some al-Qaeda terrorists since 1998." True, there is no persuasive evidence available to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks. But there were grounds for concern that if Iraq continued along the same path, expertise in weapons of mass destruction might have been provided to al-Qaeda.

'The Senate report added another important element to this observation: "The Central Intelligence Agency's judgment that Saddam Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with a global reach - al-Qaeda - to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of war, was reasonable. No information has emerged thus far to suggest that Saddam did try to employ al-Qaeda in conducting terrorist attacks." '

And on the relationship between Saudi and al Qaeda, Gold points out that although there was no evidence of an institutional connection there was plenty of evidence of other ties, not least the sheer number of Saudis who were recuited to the jihad. In the light of all this evidence, and the resistance to drawing the obvious conclusions from it, Gold has this to say:

'The debate over 9/11 intelligence ultimately involves a question of the degree of proof that observers expect in order to determine whether certain relationships exist. Do analysts expect a written "memorandum of understanding" between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to establish that a cooperative relationship existed? Aren't the provision of a safe haven to al-Qaeda and reports of Iraqi training of its operatives a sufficient source of concern? Similarly, is it necessary to produce a check signed by a senior Saudi official to an al-Qaeda operative in order to prove Saudi financial backing of the organization? Doesn't the movement of funds to al-Qaeda from charities financed and monitored by the Saudi government raise serious questions about Riyadh's past role in the growth of the new terrorism?'

Unfortunately, our society currently does require precisely such certainty before it is prepared to concede that there is a risk; indeed, unless there is such certainty, it goes further and denies all the evidence that common-sense suggests such a risk exists. Since certainty in such matters is usually impossible, this society will fail to acknowledge this risk until it is too late. And our intelligence agencies, since they have now been told in no uncertain terms that the public does not want to hear about such risks unless there is uranium-enriched proof, labelled, dated and signed in triplicate by dictators and terrorists and with western targets stencilled on the side, they may well ignore any future evidence of the mortal danger facing the west that comes their way -- just as they did before.

The ever-illuminating Amir Taheri has a characteristically sharp and important point to make about the manifest intellectual inadequacy of the US 9/11 Commission report:

'The report assumes that there is a single, readily identifiable enemy. This is the routine way of political thinking, that took shape during the Cold War. Anyone with knowledge of the Arab countries and the Muslim world in general would know that this is not the case. The problem with the current War on Terror is that the democracies, and those Muslims who aspire for democracy, are faced with a multi-faceted threat that assumes numerous forms, from the burning of books to the cutting of throats. This is a war that has to be fought on numerous battlefields and against many enemies that, though united in their efforts to destroy the democratic societies, and first among them the United States, use a bewilderingly wide range of weapons and tactics. The Bush administration has opened the military theatre of this war by liberating Afghanistan and Iraq and seeking to destroy the terrorists in there. But this is a war that must also be fought on diplomatic, cultural, religious and political battlefields. In all those theatres the United States would need, and can find, allies, including among a majority of the Muslims who have been the first victims of Islamic fascism and its ideology of terror. The commission has no suggestions about how to engage in those battles, who to choose as allies and who to identify as neutrals.'

What Taheri means is that we are facing a kind of 'total' war. Yet our leaders insist on seeing it as a limited political or military problem, capable of defeat either on the battlefield or through negotiation and agreement. As Taheri observes:

'This enemy does not want to give and take, to compromise, or to triangulate. He wants you to obey him in every detail or he will kill you... He will not be happy even if, in the spirit of liberal generosity, you gave him half of your power and wealth. Nor would he settle for a total American withdrawal from the world. Nor would he be satisfied if you helped wipe Israel off the map. This enemy's conflict with the United States, and alongside it other democracies, not to mention those Muslims who also aspire after democracy, is not political but existential. He wants to rule you because he thinks he is the holder of a "the highest form of truth." This enemy wants you, the whole world in fact, to convert to Islam because he believes the advent of Islam abrogated all other religions. Anyone who is not a Muslim is not a full human being. "Our struggle is not about land or water," the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini said in 1980. "It is about bringing, by force if necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path." '

One day, this will become clear to everyone. The problem is, what state we'll be in by the time that happens.

My oh my, what confusion. There’s more political cross-dressing going on than in a convention of drag queens. My attention was caught by a line in Matthew d’Ancona’s diary in this week’s Spectator:

‘John Redwood asks a question founded on the premise that ‘the UK fights too many wars’, and I notice several Tory heads bobbing up and down in the audience. No doubt about it: the Conservatives are completely rethinking their instinctively robust attitude to military intervention.’

Michael Howard ties himself up in knots about no longer supporting the war in Iraq on the terms on which he originally supported it while claiming that he continues to support it as vigorously as he originally did; two Tory MPs are helping Democrat John Kerry’s push for the White House, and the Massachusetts senator is reportedly more popular than President Bush among Tory MPs and supporters. No doubt about it: the Tories can no longer be relied on to be conservatives. They are turning into what Adrian Wooldridge has presciently dubbed ‘Michael Moore conservatives’ (see May 26 post below) — anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-America and anti-truth.

This confusion was very well reflected at the weekend in a column in the Sunday Times by the self-styled conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan. Under the headline ‘Kerry: the right choice for conservatives’, Sullivan argued that conservatives should not support Bush because he was not a conservative at all but a radical liberal. This is because he junked the old style realpolitik of his father and embraced instead nation-building in the Middle East, expanded government in health and education and funnelled money into religious charities at home, and behaved recklessly in Iraq with some disastrous effects. ‘Real’ conservatism, claimed Sullivan, is espoused by Kerry — scrapping the doctrine of preventive attack, strengthening ties with ‘Old Europe’ and giving stability precedence over democracy and human rights.

But does Sullivan actually approve of this Kerry platform? Well no, apparently; and yet he would support Kerry against Bush. He supports Bush on the war, but then he attacks him; and his bottom line is a quite astonishing complacency:

‘On the most fundamental matter, ie the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realise that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers. Much of the hard work has now been done. Nobody seriously believes that Bush will start another war. And in some ways Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation building than Bush. At home Bush has done much to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government and he has been almost criminally reckless in his conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing WMDs. He and America will be hard put to regain the moral high ground after Abu Ghraib.’

Sullivan is all over the place on the war: a faint-heart who, while ostensibly still supporting it, has nevertheless succumbed to the absurd and irrational propaganda of the anti-war mob that says because no WMD have been found they never existed, and that Abu Ghraib destroyed America’s claim to moral superiority over terrorist rogue states. But the significance of his remarks extends beyond the immediate issue of the war. They reveal a moral equivalence that is fundamentally illiberal and unconservative. This is hardly surprising, given Sullivan’s well-known views as a passionate crusader for gay rights, and for the liberalisation of soft drugs on the basis that they do no harm to anyone (someone should show him the psychiatric wards full of people suffering from marijuana psychosis and other mental ailments that directly harm not only the drug users themselves but those who come into contact with them and indeed the wider society).

But the key point is that Sullivan defines himself as a conservative. And there are many within the British Conservative party who hold very similar views on both domestic and foreign issues. But these British Tories are not conservatives. Nor are they authentic liberals (not the same as the statist left, although in the US the terms are even more confusingly conflated). They are libertines, people who have gone with the contemporary cultural flow of destroying moral rules and boundaries. And it is these pseudo-conservatives who tend to be on that wing of the party that is having a fit of the vapours about nation-building and preventive action in the Middle East, and love instead the EU and the UN and John Kerry. They prefer the ‘stability’ of tyranny and its world export, genocidal terrorism. They are, in short, appeasers and sometimes even fellow-travellers of wrong-doing, both at home and abroad.

Such people often think of themselves as liberals. But authentic liberalism is very different. For it was at its core a moral project, based on the desire to suppress the bad and promote the good in the belief that a better society could and should be built. What has happened in recent decades is that this moral core which upholds social norms and discriminates against values that threaten them has been replaced by a post-modern creed of the left, which has tried to destroy all external authority and moral norms and the institutions that uphold them, and replace them by an individualist, moral free-for-all —the creed which has led to the moral relativism and denial of truth that lie at the core of the anti-war movement.

Where Sullivan is absolutely right is to call Bush a liberal. For in repudiating the corrupted values of both the post-moral left and the reactionary appeasers of the right, Bush has indeed exhibited the classic liberal desire to build a better society, along with the characteristic liberal optimism that such a project can and must succeed.

And this is surely why Bush is so hated by the left. For this hatred wildly exceeds the normal dislike of a political opponent. It is as visceral and obsessive as it is irrational. At root, this is surely because Bush has got under the skin of the post-moral left in a way no true conservative ever would. And this is because he has stolen their own clothes and revealed them to be morally naked. He has exposed the falseness of their own claim to be liberal. He has revealed them instead to be reactionaries, who want both to preserve the despotic and terrorist status quo abroad and to go with the flow of social and moral collapse at home, instead of fighting all these deformities and building a better society.

The writer Michael Novak comes close to saying this in an article for National Review. Seeking to explain the ‘orgy of hatred’ for Bush indulged by the left, Novak pinpoints the real target of this hatred which is the ‘neo-conservatives’ with whom Bush is bracketed:

‘Then, too, the Left has developed a tic about neoconservatives. These former leftists (for a former leftist is what a neoconservative is, of the first generation anyway) do have a vision of the future, a bright vision to rival that of the Left. They fight the Left, ideology for ideology, policy proposal for policy proposal, class analysis for class analysis. The neoconservatives side with the conservatives on most issues, but with an attitude, and an aim, and a determination. They are, in the life of the intellect, warriors. Their sharpest weapon is the reality check. That is their comparative advantage over the Left. They have been “mugged by” and won over to reality. The Left has lost argument after argument to the neoconservatives for the past 20 years — has proved to be on the wrong side of reality on issue after issue — and hence reserves for the neoconservatives a special loathing. George W. Bush turns out to have been far closer to the neoconservatives (though he is not one) than Ann Richards and Al Gore ever believed possible. True enough, he is no intellectual, and would not want to be one. Still, his mind is quicker, of a more tempered steel, and honed to a more acute practicality than lazy-minded leftists before 2001 ever allowed themselves to imagine. They “misunderestimated” him then, and still do.’

The neo-cons, the ‘liberals mugged by reality’, are still driven by the progressive desire to build a better world. Bush, with his religious imperative, believes the same thing. They both understand that the post-moral left is doing its damnedest to destroy that world instead and has left a trail of harm, misery, accelerating social breakdown and erosion of human dignity in its wake.

It is authentic liberal values, the bedrock of western democracy and morality, which are under relentless attack from both within and from without. Once, conservatives understood that their mission was to defend such values against an enemy who would destroy them. Now, they so little understand who that enemy is that many of them now march under its banner. That is the crisis of modern conservatism, and the threat to our society.

It takes those who have suffered under totalitarianism to recognise lies when they see them:

'Michael Moore's contentious film Fahrenheit 9/11 has opened in Poland, with some film critics likening it to totalitarian propaganda. Gazeta Wyborcza reviewer Jacek Szczerba called the film a "foul pamphlet". He said it was too biased to be called a documentary and was similar to work by Nazi propaganda director Leni Riefenstahl.'

As ever, Charles Krauthammer gets to the point. The 9/11 report, along with other sources, suggests that there was an al Qaeda/Iran axis. Aha, say the appeaseniks -- Bush invaded the wrong country! Bullseye! But as Krauthammer says, the conclusion they would draw from that is not the one they should draw, that Iran is an unconscionable threat to us all, and that its open and obvious dash to equip itself with nuclear weapons must be stopped as a matter of urgency. The appeasenik response to such a threat is -- to do nothing about it. As he says:

'We know the central foreign policy principle of Bush critics: multilateralism. John Kerry and the Democrats have said it a hundred times: The source of our troubles is President Bush's insistence on "going it alone." They promise to "rejoin the community of nations" and "work with our allies." Well, that happens to be exactly what we have been doing regarding Iran. And the policy is an abject failure. The Bush administration, having decided that invading one axis-of-evil country was about as much as either the military or the country can bear, has gone multilateral on Iran, precisely what the Democrats advocate. Washington delegated the issue to a committee of three -- the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany -- that has been meeting with the Iranians to get them to shut down their nuclear program.

'The result? They have been led by the nose. Iran is caught red-handed with illegally enriched uranium, and the Tehran Three prevail upon the Bush administration to do nothing while they persuade the mullahs to act nice. Therefore, we do not go to the U.N. Security Council to declare Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We do not impose sanctions. We do not begin squeezing Iran to give up its nuclear program. Instead, we give Iran more time to swoon before the persuasive powers of "Jack of Tehran" -- British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw -- until finally, humiliatingly, Iran announces that it will resume enriching uranium and that nothing will prevent it from becoming a member of the "nuclear club." '

In other words, the appeaseniks are working themselves into a lather about how appalling it was to have gone to war against one insupportable threat because they want to not go to war against two.

Whoa, they riposte -- if Iran was in league with al Qaeda, then Iraq couldn't have been because Iran and Iraq are sworn enemies and as we all know by now, the Shia aren't on speakers with the Sunni and vice versa and al Qaeda is Sunni. This is one of the most egregious mistakes of all. For alliances of expediency are always being made in the interests of defeating a common enemy, as comrade Stalin and Herr Ribbentrop so graphically demonstrated.

And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that Saddam and bin Laden understood this. Although the 9/11 Commission says there was no evidence of a 'collaborative operational relationship' between the two, it details repeated contacts between them, as did the Senate and Butler reports. It is possible, of course, that they merely sniffed round each other. But it is unlikely they would have met so repeatedly without some tangible gain. Given that bin Laden was, these reports tell us, desperate to lay his hands on WMD and Saddam was developing the stuff, and given Saddam's role as the sugar-daddy of terror without footprints, it is surely reasonable to suppose that these links were indeed as productive as they were concealed. And as the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Centre observed: 'any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States.'

The 9/11 Commission itself acknowledged the reality of Islamist cross-sectarian alliances. As it says:

'Bin Ladin seemed willing to include in the confederation terrorists from almost every corner of the Muslim world... Turabi [the then leader of Sudan] sought to persuade Shiites and Sunnis to put aside their divisions and join against the common enemy. In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security.

'To protect his own ties with Iraq,Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad’s control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin’s help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy... With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary, Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995. Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request. As described below, the ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.'

The fact remains that the 'axis of evil' was and is a reality, and all its constituent parts need to be dealt with. But whatever the evidence of the danger these states pose to the west (and let us not forget that at the beginning the appeasenik tendency did not disagree that Saddam was a threat, merely that they thought he should be allowed to pull the wool over the eyes of the world indefinitely) the appeasenik line is that we should all continue to dance to their tune. What remains to be see is whether a second Bush term would take on Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, or whether the poisonous political legacy of Iraq has fatally hollowed out such aspirations to create a new and better world order.

The always impressive Islamic expert Professor Raphael Israeli has come up with a blueprint for a new, moral world order. Instead of the corrupt terror club of the United Nations he proposes the formation of an alliance of Western and Democratic States (AWADS), at the centre of which would be the US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe, and which other countries could only join provided they met the political and moral criteria of democratic values, respect for human life and the rule of law. As he says:

'This system may sidetrack the chaotic situation in the UN today, where politics and shifting majorities, composed of dictatorships for the most part, determine the moral and other standards of behaviour in the world body. Durban 2001, should remain for ever a warning to the level of hatred and bigotry that the UN today is capable of stooping to'.

Such an arrangement would provide powerful incentives to countries perpetrating tyranny and terror to alter their practices. For as Prof Israeli correctly observes, the 'putrid' UN, whch rewards rogue states by giving them global status, prestige and power, provides every incentive for hatred and state terror.

This mad world order, however, has got such a grip on public consciousness and twisted its values so badly that Prof Israeli's detailed prescription for a return to moral health will strike many, as he himself observes, as harsh. He suggests severe restrictions on immigration and tourism from states which foment hatred of the west; restrictions on economic and technical aid unless such states make demonstrable progress towards democracy and human rights; no military assistance or weapons sales to non-AWADS states; permission to build Islamic institutions in the west to be made contingent upon permission to build non-Islamic institutions in Muslim countries and an end to their incitement of hatred; and a 'credible and devastating force of punishment (not revenge, as the Muslims would have it) is ready to be unleashed every time an identifiable act of terrorism is perpetrated'.

He concludes:

'These measures seem harsh, even inhuman and undemocratic to the squeamish and faint-hearted among us. But they are needed by democracies to defend themselves in this hour of emergency. Other optimistic minds believe that by explaining and apologizing, the West's righteousness shall prevail and the bad spirits that have been threatening all of us shall be soothed and mitigated. Still others are expecting other interpretations of Islam to emerge, which will be more enlightened, accommodating and modern. Such interpretations do exist, but in the underground, they are based more on apologetics than on moral grounds, and their authors have been attacked, killed, maimed or disgraced. The masses of the Arabs are not exposed to free speech and to liberal media with contradicting opinions, they are subjected to the uniform and repetitive message of hate and illusion that is hammered into their heads, day in day out, in the form of incitement, therefore they do not know any better. No enlightenment can be expected to emerge from a conservative Islam, which does not even possess the humanity of compassion to victims of terrorist massacres, and no liberal Muslim individuals will have the courage, let alone the power and stamina to enforce their dissenting marginal views on the terrifyingly deluded and incited masses. Therefore, the West has no much choice but to go all the way all alone in thinking, planning and implementing its measures of self-defense and survival.'

Alas, the west is not prepared to face up to this. Read it all.

Persistent and disturbing reports from the US suggest that terrorists are using passenger aircraft for dry runs for further atrocities. The alarm was first sounded in a remarkable piece by Annie Jacobsen, (with a follow-up here) who described a terrifying flight when she watched in mounting alarm as a group of Middle Eastern men behaved suspiciously throughout the flight, appearing to signal to each other over a systematic traffic to and from the lavatory. This was more than one woman being spooked: the flight crew were also monitoring what was going on, as were air marshals on board who detained the men on landing -- although they were later said to be a group of Syrian musicians on their way to a booking.

Now, a piece in the Washington Times suggests that terrorist dry runs are frequent occurrences:

'At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane. "No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said. Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods...A second pilot said that, on one of his recent flights, an air marshal forced his way into the lavatory at the front of his plane after a man of Middle Eastern descent locked himself in for a long period.

'The marshal found the mirror had been removed and the man was attempting to break through the wall. The cockpit was on the other side. The second pilot said terrorists are "absolutely" testing security. "There is a great degree of concern in the airline industry that not only are these dry runs for a terrorist attack, but that there is absolutely no defense capabilities on a vast majority of airlines," the second pilot said.'

The 9/11 Commission has just detailed the chronic lapses in intelligence, security and counter-terrorist organisation that led up to 9/11. In these circumstances, why are planes continuing to fly when such alarm is raised among passengers, crew and air marshals on board? Why are such suspicious individuals still being allowed onto aircraft in the first place?

As readers of this website will know, there is copious evidence showing that the 'man-made global warming' theory is no more than a global scam. Now, however, the theory is in serious trouble. A key tenet on which the entire theory is based has just been blown into the stratosphere. This is the so-called 'hockey-stick' image, created by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, which purportedly shows a 700-year period where temperatures remained relatively constant followed by the last 100-plus years where temperatures have shot upwards. This image was crucial to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's political conclusion that global warming was happening and that human activities were responsible.

But now, no fewer than five separate studies have concluded that Mann and Jones's calculations were fatally flawed. The findings of these studies, reported by the National Centre for Policy Analysis, are devastating. Not only did Mann and Jones manage to miss both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age -- a bit of a slip, that, to miss a mere 850 years out of 1700 -- periods which indicated both that the world was once a lot warmer than it is now, and that any warming taking place over the past century is hardly surprising since it followed the Little Ice Age. They also

'unjustifiably truncated or extrapolated trends from source data, used obsolete data, made incorrect calculations, and associated data sets with incorrect geographical locations' and had further 'methodological problems' including unjustifiably excluding bore-hole data which was described as 'just bad science' and a 'selective and inappropriate presentation' of results, not to mention 'incorrect representation of longer-term trends' and fatal errors in all three components of their temperature reconstruction.

In other words, as the NCPA author David Legates concludes, the primary assessment used by the IPCC appears to be 'more junk science than solid evidence'. The 'research' on which the whole global warming theory has been based is, in short, utter, unscientific tripe. Nevertheless, Sir David King, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, has been making ever more bizarre claims. The Guardian reported a few days ago:

'There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than for 55m years, enough to melt all the ice on the planet and submerge cities like London, New York and New Orleans, Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser has warned..."We are moving from a warm period into the first hot period that man has ever experienced since he walked on the planet." '

Has Sir David too, perhaps, managed to miss the Medieval Warm Period? Shouldn't someone do him a kindness and slip the NCPA analysis into his in-tray?

Man-made global warming was the great scientific fraud of the last century. When this eventually sinks in, the way in which certain eminent scientists allowed themselves to be duped will surely take its place among the infamous pseudo-scientific scandals of history.

The world terror supporters' club, aka the UN, has told Israel to tear down its security barrier. This follows the ruling by the terror court, the ICJ, that the barrier is illegal (see below). Neither of these decisions is binding, but they are intended to build up the global demonisation of Israel as a pariah state, the necessary prelude to its destruction. Meanwhile, in the US where Christian support for Israel is so strong, the General Asssembly of the Presbyterian Church has equated Israel with apartheid South Africa and called for universal divestment from it.

These developments all signal a world that is descending ever deeper into a terrifying moral darkness. If the Jews have always been a society's pit canaries whose fate is an early warning of that society's wider collapse, Israel is surely the canary in the mine of the world. The way it is being treated bespeaks a mortal sickness. Israel is the victim of a continuing, half-century attempt to annihilate it. Yet its attempts to defend itself are denounced and vilified, its activities are misreported and distorted, it is judged by malign double standards to paint it falsely as a rogue state -- and all the while those doing so look the other way while a genocide is perpetrated in Sudan, sanitised even in today's papers as merely a 'humanitarian' catastrophe. The moral inversion involved was captured in a remark by Mark Steyn in yesterday's Telegraph:

'The UN system is broken beyond repair. In May, even as its proxies were getting stuck into their ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan was elected to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Commission. This isn't an aberration: Zimbabwe is also a member. The very structure of the organisation, under which countries vote in regional blocs, encourages such affronts to decency.'

This is the same UN that has now pronounced that Israel should not defend itself aganist the war of exterminatory mass murder being perpetrated against its citizens. This treatment of Israel goes far beyond the fate of that particular region. The obsessive malice with which it is vilified and libelled, and the tacit and even explicit encouragement of the war of mass murder against it, while atrocities in Africa are not only ignored but their perpetrators given a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, for heaven's sake, shows that not just the UN but the world order it represents are bust, broken, bankrupt.

For faced with this obscene parody of a world body that is supposed to promote and uphold peace and justice but actually ignores, promotes and upholds genocide, mass murder, tyranny, terrorism and endemic corruption, the democracies of the west not only ignore such evidence but profess to believe that the UN is a moral exemplar without whose imprimatur wars are illegitimate and whose every utterance or action possesses unchallengeable moral authority. But the correct -- indeed, the only -- moral response to the UN would be to shut it down. While the world is run by tyrannies --and despite the US veto at the UN, it is so run -- tyranny, terrorism and genocide will of course continue unabated, and the victims of these atrocities will be regarded at best with indifference and at worst demonised as villains in order to protect the guilty. That is the twisted and lethal phenomenon of which Israel is both victim and symbol.

The scale of this moral inversion is so huge, so profound and so fundamental that the Presbyterian Church decision has provoked an incandescent protest by Denis Prager, a US talk-show host who thought Christianity was on the side of good but now finds it has been hijacked to serve the cause of evil. Prager spells out the nature of this obscenity:

'It takes a particularly virulent strain of moral idiocy and meanness to single out Israel, not Arafat's Palestinian Authority, or terror-supporting, death-fatwa-issuing Iran, or women-subjugating Saudi Arabia, for condemnation and economic ruin. One of the most decent societies, one of the most liberal democracies in the world, is fighting for its life against Islamic fascists who praise the Holocaust and publicly call for the annihilation of Israel -- and the Presbyterian Church calls for strangling Israel!

'Apartheid state? This Goebbels-like Big Lie, concocted by the world's anti-Israel and anti-American Left and by those who want Israel destroyed, is now an official doctrine of the Presbyterian Church. Israel is a nation whose population is one-quarter non-Jewish Arab, with the same rights, including voting and its own political parties, as Jewish citizens; a nation whose second official language is Arabic, the language of those who wish to annihilate the Jewish country; a nation that occupies a tiny sliver of land known as the West Bank only because Jordan, overwhelmingly composed of Palestinians, invaded Israel in 1967 in order to destroy it and thereby lost its ownership of the West Bank.'

And then Prager draws a conclusion as stark and bleak as it is true:

'This is one of the morality-clarifying issues of our time. To single out Israel for economic strangulation while that good nation fights for its life is an act of such immorality that holding that view precludes one from the title "good" or "God-fearing," for if they are true to God, I am false to Him. If they are good, I who support Israel am bad. If their Bible teaches them to strangle Israel and support Yasser Arafat, I am guided by a different Bible. They have drawn a line. It is now time for good people, Presbyterians specifically, Christians generally, to distance themselves vigorously and publicly from this morally sick church. And it is time, once again, for Jews to realize that the enemies of the Jews in our day are to be found on the Christian Left while their friends are far more often on the Christian Right.'

Israel is the defining moral issue of our time. Not because its situtation is the worst in the world -- the genocide in Sudan is clearly in a different league. But because the way the world is treating it exemplifies a global moral sickness in which truth, goodness and the victims of an annihilatory madness are ignored, dehumanised or attacked, while lies, wickedness and their perpetrators are appeased, endorsed and supported.

Savage, forensic dissection by Anne Bayevsky of the International Court of Justice ruling against Israel's security barrier makes clear that the noxious implications of this judgment go far beyond the demonisation of Israel:

'The Court has declared four new rules about the meaning of the right of self-defense in the face of terrorism today.
(1) There is no right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter when the terrorists are not state actors.
(2) There is no right of self-defense against terrorists who operate from any territory whose status is not finalized, and who therefore attack across disputed borders.
(3) Where military action is perpetrated by "irregulars," self-defense does not apply if the "scale and effects" of the terrorism are insufficient to amount to "an armed attack...had it been carried out by regular armed forces." (The scale in this case is 860 Israeli civilians killed in the last three years — the proportional equivalent of at least 14 9/11's.)
(4) Self-defense does not include nonviolent acts, or in the words of Judge Rosalyn Higgins: "I remain unconvinced that non-forcible measures (such as the building of a wall) fall within self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter."

'These conclusions constitute a direct assault on the ability of every U.N. member to fight international terrorism. The U.N. Charter was not a suicide pact and Security Council resolutions in response to 9/11 were intended to strengthen the capacity to confront violent non-state actors, not defeat it.'

As far as Israel itself was concerned, Bayevsky exposes the judges' malevolent selectivity, double standards, political bias, historical distortion and misrepresentation of UN resolutions, as well as this:

'Having couched their analysis in general terms, however, some of the judges were concerned that the go-ahead for Palestinian suicide bombers might not be obvious enough. So Judge Abdul Koroma of Sierra Leone wrote: "It is understandable that a prolonged occupation would engender resistance." Judge Nabil Elaraby of Egypt said, "Throughout the annals of history, occupation has always been met with armed resistance. Violence breeds violence." He "wholeheartedly subscribe[d] to the view" that there is "a right of resistance." Judge Hisashi Owada of Japan spoke of the "the so-called terrorist attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers against the Israeli civilian population." '

I happen to think that, while the barrier may well be a regrettable necessity, the routing of it beyond the Green Line is wrong. But by this judgment, the ICJ has revealed that the idea it has anything to do with justice is an Orwellian satire. It is instead a body that degrades justice and implicitly promotes terror. It should forfeit all respect. But we live in uniquely degraded and corrupted times. Bayevsky ends with this plea:

'The Arab drive to destroy the state of Israel has debased the U.N., sullied its charter, perverted the meaning of human rights, and ransacked international law and its highest Court. How many more of the universal ideals upon which our world depends must be desecrated before we say "enough"?'

Alas, I fear, plenty more.

A piece by John O'Sullivan in the Chicago Sun-Times highlights some helpful if obvious points about the great intelligence witch-hunt. First, the Senate report confirmed that every intelligence service in the world, including France and Russia, believed Saddam had WMD. Second, Bush and Blair have been cleared of the charge of deliberate exaggeration.

But his further point is more significant. He reminds us of evidence not reported in Britain (but mentioned on this website) which suggests that the conventional, er, wisdom that there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq might be unadulaterated horse-manure. For why? Here's why:

'A report to the U.N. Security Council in June this year by the acting executive head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission claims that before, during and after the war, Saddam shipped WMD and medium- range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. U.N. officials say they do not yet have a full accounting of exactly what weapons passed out of Iraq in this way, but that entire factories were among the items transported abroad. If that is so -- and this report may turn out to be exaggerated -- then our current conventional wisdom will have to be overturned.'

I want a front-row seat when that happens.

A truly horrifying report in the Guardian about the slaughter in Sudan which the western world resolutely ignores brings out the racial and religious dimension very clearly:

'While African women in Darfur were being raped by the Janjaweed militiamen, Arab women stood nearby and sang for joy, according to an Amnesty International report published yesterday. The songs of the Hakama, or the "Janjaweed women" as the refugees call them, encouraged the atrocities committed by the militiamen. The women singers stirred up racial hatred against black civilians during attacks on villages in Darfur and celebrated the humiliation of their enemies, the human rights group said...According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said: "The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of [Sudanese president Omer Hassan] al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God." The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village: "You are gorillas, you are black, and you are badly dressed." '

The Telegraph reports:

'One woman, five months pregnant, who was abducted with eight others, said that five or six men raped them every night for six days. One of the group was aged 8. She said: “My husband could not forgive me after this. He disowned me.” Other testimony described how a 14-year-old was raped in the marketplace in front of her mother before her brother was tied up and thrown into a fire. A 23-year-old mother of three described how she was raped by five men one night, and three the next, before she managed to escape, but said other women who tried to flee had their legs or arms broken. “The effect is to tear at the social fabric of the communities, leaving the women as spoilt goods who are disowned by their husbands,” Ms Truscott said. “The horrific nature and scale of the violence appears to be a collective punishment of a population whose members have taken up arms against the central Government.”

This abomination, which has been going on for years, is being perpetrated by Arab Muslims against others on the grounds that they are Christian and that they are black. Other victims are black Muslims. It is therefore an example of the horror that that western liberals are supposed to be pledged never again to allow, a religious and racial genocide. Yet over Sudan, the great western liberal 'conscience' barely stirs. It is having too much fun instead accusing western democracies (falsely) of warmongering, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment -- because as we all know, only the western democracies are ever guilty and third world peoples don't commit atrocities. Truly, we live in an utterly disgusting age.

An acquaintance of mine recently visited Blackwells bookshop in Oxford to buy 'The Case for Israel' by Alan Dershowitz. Unable to find it on the shelves, she asked the assistant behind the desk: 'Do you have a copy of "The Case for Israel" by Alan Dershowitz?' He replied: 'There is no case for Israel'.

The left's embrace of the new Judeophobia has reached as far as New Zealand, as Stan Beer reports. Key passage:

'Recently, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark suspended diplomatic relations with Israel because two Israeli men were convicted of trying to obtain false New Zealand passports. Ms. Clark then took the unprecedented step for a democratic leader of stating publicly as fact that the two Israelis were Mossad agents - even though there was no evidence to support this allegation and the men were not accused by authorities of being spies.

In fact, Ms. Clark has deliberately sought to demonise Israel in the eyes of the local populace and the world. As far as the local populace is concerned, she appears to have succeeded - the world doesn't need convincing. There was already a high level of anti-Israel sentiment in New Zealand. However, now the fires of anti-Semitism have also been stoked. Jewish graves have been vandalised and desecrated in the immediate aftermath of Ms. Clark's actions, yet she had the temerity to claim that there was no proof of any connection between the two events. One can only surmise, then, that to Ms. Clark, proof is a nebulous concept that can be used or discarded when it is convenient. Absent of any proof, she stated as fact that two Israelis were Mossad agents, acting at the behest of the Israeli government. Yet she demands proof of links between her anti-Israel actions and subsequent anti-Semitic acts in her country.'

The roots of this pathology go very deep, as has been discussed elsewhere; but across the world, it is the political left which is fanning it into life.

Having been out of action for the past ten days, I have only just caught up with both the US Senate and the Butler reports on the intelligence effort on Iraq. These reports have caused foaming hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic, with daily headlines screaming that Bush lied, Blair lied, we were taken to war on a lie, there were no WMD, the intelligence had no integrity and was garbage, politicians misrepresented the intelligence which was full of integrity, and Saddam was never any threat to the west. After ploughing through both reports, I am astonished, even by the degraded standards of the anti-war press, by the monstrous distortion and malevolence of this reaction.

The reports undoubtedly paint a disturbing picture of faults in both the CIA and SIS, errors in intelligence (par for the course in such a world of shadows) and the utterly unwise and wrong-headed use of that intelligence — with all its inherent frailties — in an attempt to gain public support, an exercise which inevitably did not admit to such frailties in any of the source material. These are grave faults. Nevertheless, these reports do not in any sense justify the claims that Bush and Blair lied and that all their claimed evidence against Saddam has crumbled into dust.

The first and most obvious point is that we were not taken to war on a lie because we were not taken to war on the basis of these intelligence reports, let alone the infamous British dossier of September 2002 (which, incidentally, Butler says in terms did not make the case for war or for any course of action but was merely a source of information to the public). The casus belli was the fact that Saddam was in breach of the UN resolutions requiring him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programmes, because these combined with his record and strategic threat to the region made him a danger that could not be tolerated.

Let’s not forget that what is being now argued is no longer merely that the war was the wrong way to deal with Saddam — the original anti-war position — but that Saddam posed no threat to the west at all, that he had no WMD, was not involved in terrorism and that all these things were exaggerated by Bush and Blair.

But on the contrary, despite the reports’ strictures against wrong intelligence they both provide evidence of a grave threat from Saddam that no responsible government could possibly have ignored.

Both committees confirm that Saddam had connections with al Qaeda. The Senate says the CIA was right to believe that Saddam was up to his neck in terrorism against the US throughout the 1990s and was planning further outrages against it in 2002.

Even more striking, both committees say Saddam was indeed trying to buy uranium from Niger, the claim the anti-war mob has repeatedly said was a lie. It was not a lie. It was true. And unlike all the dual-use ambiguities elsewhere, there is no dual use for uranium. Saddam wanted it because he was trying to make a nuclear bomb. Put that with his links with al Qaeda and his history of terrorism against the US, and you have a risk which no responsible political leader could possibly countenance — and once 9/ll changed the whole calculus of risk, Bush and Blair knew they could no longer countenance it as they had previously done.

Okay, these committees say there was no evidence of any co-operative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. But the anti-war mob insists there could be no connection between the two at all because of their religious differences. Yet Butler tells us:

‘Contacts between Al Qaida and the Iraqi Directorate General of Intelligence had dated back over four years. “Fragmentary and uncorroborated” intelligence reports suggested that in 1998 there were contacts between Al Qaida and Iraqi intelligence. Those reports described Al Qaida seeking toxic chemicals as well as other conventional terrorist equipment. Some accounts suggested that Iraqi chemical experts may have been in Afghanistan during 2000.’

British intelligence concluded nevertheless that there was ‘too much mistrust’ for practical co-operation between Saddam and al Qaeda. But this was merely a judgment; and if there’s one thing that leaps out from this whole saga, it is that time and again the spooks made misjudgment after misjudgment about the raw intelligence they were processing. These were the people who, as Butler makes clear, were slow to grasp the threat posed by Bin Laden and WMD and who were caught napping by 9/11. They were ignorant of the nature and extent of the Islamic jihad, ignorant of the alliances of convenience being made across sectarian divides in the broader cause of the jihad against the west. As is devastatingly clear from the forensic investigative work done by the terrorism expert Laurie Mylroie, the CIA refused to accept the overwhelmingly strong circumstantial — if not conclusive — evidence of a serious ongoing relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. As the Senate committee reported, one (anonymous) analyst told it that the CIA had provided a great deal of evidence about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda but had attempted ‘to discredit, dismiss or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many cases. Therefore the CIA’s report should be read for content only and the CIA’s conclusions should be ignored’.

Yet these facts have scarcely been remarked upon. Instead, there has been a hue and cry over the conclusion that the assessment that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD was wrong. But leave aside whether such stockpiles were moved to Syria, buried in the sand or destroyed immediately after the war ended (all of which are entirely possible). Stockpiles were not the reason we went to war. It was the UN resolutions, stupid. And since a single bag of anthrax can cause thousands of deaths, this fixation with non-existent stockpiles is demonstrably absurd and simply a handy stick with which to beat Blair and Bush.

The Butler report, meanwhile, has been presented by the malign hysterics in the British media as principally an attack on the way the intelligence was politicised by removing all the caveats normally found in intelligence assessments. But while it is true that this intelligence was so caveated, and that these caveats were reprehensibly removed, it is also clear from Butler that despite all the caveats there was a consistent bottom line for British intelligence —that Iraq possessed WMD, about which the spooks were consistently warning long before the 2002 dossier, and that no chemical or biological stockpiles were needed as Iraq could make such weapons within weeks.

In 1996, the JIC said: ‘We do not believe Iraqi statements that the BW programme has been destroyed. Possibly substantial elements, including some production equipment and weaponised agent, continue to be concealed.’ In 1998 it believed that ‘some CW agents, munitions, precursor chemicals and production equipment remain hidden’. This assessment was based on ‘Hussein Kamil’s defection, UNSCOM’s inability to reconcile Iraqi claims for production and destruction, unaccounted-for growth media and a total lack of cooperation from the Iraqis.’

In April 2000, the JIC warned of continuing chemical agent production in Iraq. It also said: ‘There is clear evidence of continuing Iraqi biological warfare activity, including BW related research and the production of BW agent. Iraq seems to be exploring the use of mobile facilities to give its BW activities greater security. But we have no evidence for Iraq filling weapons with biological agent since the Gulf War…We continue to assess that, even without procurement from abroad, Iraq has retained sufficient expertise, equipment and materials to produce BW agents within weeks using its legitimate biotechnology facilities.'

In May 2001, it reported increasing concern about Saddam’s nuclear capability: ‘There is evidence of increased activity at Iraq’s only remaining nuclear facility and a growing number of reports on possible nuclear related procurement. We judge but cannot confirm that Iraq is conducting nuclear related research and development into the enrichment of uranium and could have longer term plans to produce enriched uranium for a weapon. If successful, this could reduce the time needed to develop a nuclear warhead once sanctions were lifted.’

In March 2002, it said: ‘Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy. Iraq is also well practised in the art of deception, such as concealment and exaggeration. A complete picture of the various programmes is therefore difficult. But it is clear that Iraq continues to pursue a policy of acquiring WMD and their delivery means. Intelligence indicates that planning to reconstitute some of its programmes began in 1995. WMD programmes were then given a further boost in 1998 with the withdrawal of UNSCOM inspectors…Although there is very little intelligence we continue to judge that Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme...We continue to judge that Iraq has an offensive chemical warfare (CW) programme, although there is very little intelligence relating to it… Iraq currently has available, either from pre Gulf War stocks or more recent production, a number of biological agents. Iraq could produce more of these biological agents within days.’

In what Butler says was a fair and balanced assessment of the intelligence, officials said in March 2002: ‘Iraq continues to develop weapons of mass destruction, although our intelligence is poor. Iraq has up to 20 650km range missiles left over from the Gulf War. These are capable of hitting Israel and the Gulf states. Design work for other ballistic missiles over the UN limit of 150km continues. Iraq continues with its BW and CW programmes and, if it has not already done so, could produce significant quantities of BW agents within days and CW agent within weeks of a decision to do so. We believe it could deliver CBW by a variety of means, including in ballistic missile warheads. There are also some indications of a continuing nuclear programme. Saddam has used WMD in the past and could do so again if his regime were threatened.’

So Butler concludes: ‘By early 2002, therefore, readers of JIC assessments will have had an impression of:
a. The continuing clear strategic intent on the part of the Iraqi regime to pursue its nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes.
b. Continuing efforts by the Iraqi regime to sustain and where possible develop its indigenous capabilities, including through procurement of necessary materiel.
c. The development, drawing on those capabilities, of Iraq’s ‘break-out’ potential in the chemical, biological and ballistic missile fields, coupled with the proven ability to weaponise onto some delivery systems chemical and biological agent.’

What happened then, according to Butler, was that even harder assessments were made by the JIC which were incorporated into the government’s dossier – including the 45-minute claim – over which, in 2003, significant doubts arose because of concerns over the reliability of some of those sources. It is these admissions of error which have caused all the excitement. But those who have seized on this part of the report have completely ignored the fact that the JIC had previously consistently and solidly warned that Saddam had a WMD capability which he was continuing to develop.

Yet despite all these JIC assessments that Butler notes – and endorses – the report nevertheless bafflingly concludes that, before the war, Iraq ‘did not, however, have significant - if any - stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them.’

There are similar lacunae in the Senate report, which is full of naïve judgments – such as that Iraqi nuclear scientists who continued to work at nuclear facilities might not have been working on nuclear weapons but were simply anxious to ‘use their expertise’; or that the CIA was guilty of ‘group-think’ by assuming that because Saddam persistently lied, deceived and dissembled he wasn’t telling the truth about WMD. Is it really ‘group-think’ not to give a persistent and proven con-man and liar the benefit of the doubt?

In addition, the Senate report does not review all the available intelligence on Iraq but confines itself to one document, the National Intelligence Estimate 2002 which it says is an authoritative overview of a decade of intelligence. But a note at the end asserts that this document was produced in three weeks flat after a Senate demand and was accordingly sloppy and full of errors. The committee did not take into account other information, such as the interim report by the former head of the Iraq survey Group Dr David Kay, who disclosed the existence of many clandestine biological programmes some of which were concealed even after the start of the war. And although he also criticised intelligence failures in claiming the existence of WMD stockpiles, he said the reality in Iraq of a possible trade in WMD between Iraqis and terrorists was even more dangerous to the world. None of this, however, is reflected in the Senate report.

The real story is surely this. The intelligence services got it very wrong throughout the 1990s. They persistently underplayed the evidence they were collecting about both Iraq and al Qaeda, as well as the relationship between the two. Some sources turned out to be frail, as is always the case. But the overall picture was consistent. The problem lay with the spooks’ own analysis. Tony Blair was wrong to press intelligence in aid to shore up the case he was failing to make successfully to the public. But that does not mean the war was wrong, or that the case he made for war was wrong. And it does not mean that Saddam was no threat. On the contrary, the evidence continues to mount that he did indeed present exactly the lethal threat that made those UN resolutions necessary in the first place.

But this isn’t reported. Instead, the media makes a leap — from ‘there were no caveats’ to ‘there were no WMD’. That’s real group-think for you —and of all the weapons against the west, it could prove the most lethal of all.

There will be no more posts now, I'm afraid, until Monday, July 19. My apologies.

So what's this, then?

'The US has revealed that it removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq in a secret operation last month. "This operation was a major achievement," said US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a statement. He said it would keep "potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists". Along with 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, about 1,000 "highly radioactive sources" were also removed. The material was taken from a former nuclear research facility on 23 June, after being packaged by 20 experts from the US Energy Department's secret laboratories. It was flown out of the country aboard a military plane in a joint operation with the Department of Defense, and is being stored temporarily at a Department of Energy facility.'

Er -- enriched uranium...Iraq... taken from a former nuclear research facility... vital to keep it out of the hands of terrorists? It certainly looks like yet another of those darned non-discoveries of Iraq's non-existent WMD materials which were in danger of being traded between Saddam's regime and non-existent terrorists, just as Dr David Kay warned in his non-existent report. No wonder this hasn't surfaced anywhere other than the BBC online service. Nothing must be allowed to shatter the prevailing non-existent prejudice that blairanbushlied, after all.

It is little short of astounding that, on the very day that Home Secretary David Blunkett refuses to do anything other than ‘monitor’ the visit to Britain of the Muslim extremist Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who has expressed violent Jew-hatred and support for human bombs, Blunkett brings forward proposals for a second time to foist upon us a new law that will almost certainly criminalise any criticism of Islam, Muslims or any other religion.

Blunkett claims that the new law would not do this but would merely prevent incitement to religious hatred, like the law against incitement to racial hatred. But there is a big difference between the two.

Racial hatred, after all, is directed against people who have no option but to be what they are. Racial hatred is therefore an attack upon people as people, clear and unambiguous. Religion, by contrast, is a principal site of impassioned argument and disputation. What it stands for is intrinsically controversial and lends itself almost by definition to giving offence to others. The scope for claims that perfectly legitimate criticism of religious doctrines or representatives of a faith are unlawful would be immense and would almost certainly criminalise certain points of view.

Of course innocent British Muslims should be protected from attack. But there are already laws to prevent physical attacks on them, as on anyone else. And the religious hatred law is unlikely to prevent actual conduct that threatens them. It will instead criminalise the wrong kind of opinion.

Specifically, it is designed as a sop to those in the Muslim community who have been conducting a relentless campaign against anyone who even so much as mentions the word ‘Islamic’ in connection with extremism or terror by vilifying them as ‘Islamophobic’. And I should know, since I am regularly targeted — along with getting on for just about every journalist who has ever written about the jihad against the west or about the troubled business of Muslim integration — for precisely this kind of crude attempt at intimidation.

Just look at what happened when Baroness Thatcher criticised Muslim clerics for not speaking out loudly enough against the American atrocities. The editor of Muslim News demanded that her ‘case’ be sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. He was backed by appeasenik goons such as Lord Heseltine, who accused her of fomenting prejudice against Muslims, and Saddam-lover George Galloway MP who said if the law against incitement to religious hatred had been in place, he would have insisted on her prosecution.

When the Blunkett proposal first surfaced three years ago, comedians such as Rowan Atkinson expressed concern that they could be sent to jail for poking fun at religion and lampooning religious figures. What about the crucifixion gags in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, for example; or the skit in Not the Nine O’Clock News, where worshippers in a mosque bowed to the ground while a voiceover intoned: ‘And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomenei’s contact lens’? As the chairman of the Liverpool Islamic Institute said, the real targets of the religious hatred law would be the ‘mockery and ridicule’ of religion.

Such a perceived insult was the reason Salman Rushdie was condemned to death for writing The Satanic Verses, the reason Muslims wanted the book banned and the reason they wanted the law of blasphemy extended from protecting Christianity to Islam. Blunkett’s religious hatred offence would represent precisely such an extension of the blasphemy law (which should be abolished) by the back door. It would not only deliver a final victory to the enemies of Rushdie’s life and liberty, but also to those who threatened or committed violence against the book’s translators and dealers. In short, it would be a victory for terror, not a blow against it.

If anyone doubts this, just look at the reaction to the mounting protests at the Al-Qaradawi visit by the ‘moderate’ Muslim Council of Britain:

‘But the Muslim Association of Britain, which is hosting Dr Al-Qaradawi, regards him as a moderating voice. Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, echoed this view. He said: “Dr Al-Qaradawi is deeply respected by millions of Muslims around the world. He has been a consistent opponent of the extremism espoused by al-Qaeda and similar groups, and has regularly denounced the killing of innocent people in the 11 September attacks.” '

Now look at a small part of what the Foreign Office was told about al Qaradawi:

‘Qaradawi sits on the Shariah [Islamic Law] Board of al-Taqwa Bank and is one of the bank’s largest shareholders . Al-Taqwa Bank was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and its assets frozen, by the U.S. government on 7 November 2001 due to its alleged involvement in al-Qaeda fundraising. Qaradawi is also the Chairman of the 101 Days Charity Coalition, a Palestinian fundraising venture that the Palestinian Authority has named as “one of the supporters – in terms of money and provisions – of the Hamas movement”. As a consequence of his alleged support for terrorism, Qaradawi has been banned from entering the United States since November 1999. Despite this, Qaradawi is a frequent visitor to the UK, often at the invitation of the Muslim Association of Britain…

‘Qaradawi does not limit his incitement at calls for violence in Israel; his sermons often call for Jews themselves to be killed. These are often accompanied by calls for “crusaders” – a code for the Christian West – and “infidels” – all non-Muslims – to suffer the same fate. Al-Qaradawi says: ‘In fact, there is hardly any fundamental difference between Judaism and Zionism.’ He says that the Torah permits Jews to spill the blood of others and to seize their money and land and that ‘with the exception of a few honourable ones, the majority of Jews support Israel’s policies.’”

The fact is that the British prosecuting authorities are too terrified to use the law that already exists criminalising incitement to hatred. Five men who were arrested a few years ago for allegedly distributing anti-Jewish literature in the ultra-orthodox area of London’s Stamford Hill were freed after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to proceed with charges of racial hatred. The police were reported as saying the charges were dropped because the material was targeted ‘only’ at a localised Jewish community, with no likelihood of civil unrest. So much for the desire to stop incitement to hatred against Jews.

Yet now look at Blunkett’s attitude towards Christians. In the Commons today, he said:

‘We need to be able to take on those extremists and say, I’m afraid in our society, pluralism and openness, the ability to accept differences without being subsumed, is crucial to our survival, it’s what distinguishes all of us, from every faith, from those who would take our lives because they reject our faith, and it applies equally from far right evangelical Christians, to extremists in the Islamic faith.’

Astonishingly, he appeared to be equating Islamist extremism with evangelical Christianity! Where are the evangelical Christians who would ‘take our lives because they reject our faith’, for heaven’s sake? The new law would trap Christians and those of other faiths and none for saying things which others may find insulting, while the government continues to turn a blind eye to the actual incitement and links to terrorism that have turned London into ‘Londonistan’. Just what kind of inverted thinking is going on here? Whose side is David Blunkett on?

Is it a mirage? No, it's an actual article in the British press telling the truth about the madness that has descended upon our society. In the Times, Anthony Browne writes bravely and with justified moral outrage to describe the astonishing alliance that has sprung up between the left and the purveyors of vicious anti-Jewish and anti-gay prejudice. On Monday, London Mayor Ken Livingstone is to open a conference on the Islamic veil, at which the guest of honour will be Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Dr al-Qaradawi just happens to be a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the extremist Islamist group which has spawned much of the jihadi terror ideology currently overwhelming the Islamic world and which has been banned in many Arab countries. But of course in dear old, sleepy, dhimmified, prejudiced and supremely ignorant Britain, a Muslim Brotherhood leader is not only allowed to visit but is given pride of place on a public platform. As Browne tells us:

'According to BBC Monitoring, Dr al-Qaradawi said last year: “Oh God, destroy the usurper Jews, the vile crusaders and infidels.” He said the killing of the American telecoms engineer Nick Berg by Islamic militants in Iraq, had to be seen “in the right context”, although he has condemned decapitations and the twin towers attacks and suicide bombings outside Israel. You can get more idea of his views on www.islamonline.net, whose contents are overseen by an editorial co-operative led by Dr al-Qaradawi. Islamonline declares that homosexuality is a “sexual perversion”, for which the penalty should be death. The only question is whether gays should be killed by being thrown off a high cliff, or flogged to death. Gay rights groups and Jewish groups, as well as London ratepayers, have a right to know why Mr Livingstone is choosing to share a platform with him.'

Dr al-Qaradawi is a guest of the Muslim Association of Britain, whose spokesman, Azzam Tamimi, was denounced in Parliament by Labour MP Louise Ellman for 'preaching hatred against Jews'. It gets worse. Fiona Mactaggart, the grotesquely named 'Race and Community Cohesion Minister', is sending a video of support to the event. Ms Mactaggart shared a platform last month with Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Sudais, who has called for the killing of Jews (see my earlier post).

The continued acquiescence of British government ministers to the activities in Britain of dangerous people who are banned from other countries is beyond belief. The alliance between the left and the forces of Muslim genocidal and anti-gay bigotry is terrifying. It is also shielded by a conspiracy of silence within the media, which Browne's courageous article does much to puncture.

Those who would like a cut-out-and-keep primer of the multitudinous lies of Michael Moore in Farragoheit 9/11 should read this compendium by Dave Kopel -- and then send it to the bozos who've been raving about it.

Another non-existent voice to testify to the non-existent link between Saddam and al Qaeda is none other than the new Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. This is part of an interview he gave to the NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw:

'Allawi: 'We know that this [the war in Iraq] is an extension to what has happened in New York. And — the war have been taken out to Iraq by the same terrorists. Saddam was a potential friend and partner and natural ally of terrorism.

'Allawi: No. I believe very strongly that Saddam had relations with al-Qaida. And these relations started in Sudan. We know Saddam had relationships with a lot of terrorists and international terrorism. Now, whether he is directly connected to the September — atrocities or not, I can’t — vouch for this. But definitely I know he has connections with extremism and terrorists.'

Note Brokaw's surprise -- and his error in reporting what the 9/11 commission actually said. For it actually said there was 'no evidence of a collaborative relationship' specifically and only in respect of contacts made between Iraq and al Qaeda after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan -- a very different matter from no links at all, which the 9/11 commission actually said there were.

But hell, what's the Iraqi Prime Minister got to say about anything to do with Iraq, when the US and British intelligentsia know what happened from the infinitely superior perspective of the armchair front-line?

As pre-emptive hysteria descends over the Butler inquiry's not-yet produced report on the use of intelligence about Iraq, which will be instantly denounced as a whitewash unless it says that Saddam was not producing WMD, which the anti-war mob know for a fact, inquiry or no inquiry thank you very much, and that Number 10 and the intelligence hierarchy lied through their teeth to take us to war on a whim, readers might care to marvel at yet more evidence of the demonstrable non-existence of Saddam's WMD. An Associated Press report last Friday said:

'Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday. Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw. "We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads and offered $5,000 apiece," Dukaczewski said. "An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine. All of our activity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads." Dukaczewski refused to give any further details about the terrorists or the sellers of the munitions, saying only that his troops thwarted terrorists by purchasing the 17 rockets for a Soviet-era launcher and two mortar rounds containing the nerve agent for an undisclosed sum June 23.'

Fascinating, isn't it, that the Poles went to such panicky lengths to buy Iraqi WMD that we all know beyond a shadow of a doubt do not and did not exist. No wonder such another non-existent non-find is not being reported by the press.

*Since writing the above, a reader has alerted me to the fact that BBC
Online did report this find. The American military appears to have dismissed it on the basis that the nerve agent was old and had deteriorated. But that is surely beside the point. As the Polish general said, the ammunition had been buried in order to avoid it being discovered by UN weapons inspectors. Why conceal it, if the intention to use WMD had really been abandoned?

The good news is that Michael Moore's Farragoheit 9/11 is so bad that even Simon Jenkins, the obsessional anti-war commentator on the Times, thinks it's rubbish. The bad news is that this is because Jenkins thinks the real story behind the Iraq war is something Moore didn't mention: that it was all cooked up by the great world Jewish conspiracy. Yup, even on the op-ed page of the Times, even from its leading, most prestigious commentator, the ancient libel of sinister Jewish power is now openly rearing its head.

Jenkins seems to have fallen under the spell of a new book, 'America Alone' by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, which apparently avers that 'a small group of neoconservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people'. And the reason? Their support for Israel. This is what Jenkins says Halper and Clarke are saying, with which he agrees:

'Their Iraq war is not about oil but about the agenda of a small group of Washington ideologues, whom they hold as traitors to the American conservative tradition. This group’s seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11 makes a fascinating study in power. Known colloquially as the Vulcans, they embraced Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the Pentagon architect of the Iraq occupation, Douglas Feith. Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush were their front men. Their first commitment was to the defence of Israel. The neocons were prominent advisers to the right-wing Israeli Binyamin Netanyahu, and opposed all Middle East “peace processes”. Having distrusted Nixon as soft on communism they distrusted Reagan as soft on Israel.

'Halper and Clarke knew and worked with many neocons during the Cold War. Their response to them is partly cultural. The Vulcans represent tunnel-vision history. Opponents are “surrender monkeys . . . gloom-sayers, saboteurs, peacemongers”. They are invariably anti-Semitic and “in league with Saddam Hussein”. (Much the same was said in Downing Street and the salons of London’s “ Pentagon chic”.) With the coming to power of President Bush the neocons deftly substituted the threat of Islam for the threat of communism. On this basis they sought a “comprehensive revamping of American foreign policy”. They disdained diplomacy, alliances and international law, which might “constrain and control American power”, and demanded pre-emptive military assertion across the Arab world.'

This pernicious theory is, of course, demonstrably ludicrous. The power of this tiny group of 'neocons' has been exaggerated out of all proportion. The idea that such a fragment of the US administration could somehow have reprogrammed the minds of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all the rest belongs to the wilder shores of paranoid fantasyland. The idea that, almost overnight, these neocons vanquished the vast interests of big oil and that lobby's myriad connections with the US administration is jaw-droppingly asinine. The idea that they could have persuaded Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al to act in the interests of Israel and against the interests of America is simply bizarre.

It also ignores various contrary facts. Like the fact that Israel actually regarded the Iraq war as a diversion from what it sees as the number one threat, Iran. Or like the fact that Rumsfeld and Cheney themselves believed straight after 9/11 that Iraq had been involved in those attacks, and that whether they were right or wrong this and this alone is why Iraq was in their sights. No other explanation is necesary, certainly not a demented conspiracy theory which would do credit to the ravings of Saudi Arabia about the Zionist hand behind terrorism in that country.

But alas, actual facts are irrelevant here. For what we are seeing is a vicious prejudice which is simply impervious to reason. It is the resurrection of the vile and disgusting belief -- which we can now see has never gone away, however we in Britain and America may have deluded ourselves about our 'civilised' society -- that the Jews possess extraordinary and sinister power which they exercise in a covert way to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind. Thus, as in the passage above, the Jews have 'seized' Washington, are 'traitors' to the conservative tradition (hello, neocons have their roots in the liberal tradition) and by implication to America itself, 'disdain' law and diplomacy because they are crazed by power-lust and the desire to kill people, and so 'deftly' provided a new threat to terrify the world after communism -- a threat which doubtless is a figment of their war-crazed imagination and nothing whatever to do with the fact that an Islamist death-cult, financed, trained and supported by a network of rogue states and which has now fanned out across the globe, has declared war on the west and is busy pursuing that murderous objective.

Note also the sneer by Jenkins at the idea that there is antisemitism at work here. What else are we supposed to call an attitude which irrationally singles out a tiny group of Jews for exercising superhuman powers they patently do not possess, to influence people with real power who did not need to be influenced, to support a country which did not seek this kind of support but thought it might be a distraction from more urgent considerations, and in a way that makes them deeply disloyal and traitorous to their own country because they actually display a higher loyalty to another?

Actually, I wouldn't call this antisemitism, a word invented by an antisemite. I'd call this straightforward Jew-hatred. Alas, its open expression is now a commonplace. Only this week, I was told by a prominent and distinguished opponent of the war in Iraq that he had been stopped from writing about it in sections of the British press by 'the Jewish lobby in America', and that Bush had gone to war in Iraq because 'he had Ariel Sharon's hand up his back'.

But then, of course, any protest at such loathsome attitudes is held up as triumphant proof of the Jewish lobby at its sinister work. Well, to hell with that. This abomination must be called by its proper name, and fought wherever it rears its ugly head.

Readers of this website will know that there are few people more passionate than I in support of America's defence of the west against the war of terror being waged against it. Nevertheless, there are deep flaws in America's position, of which perhaps the most important is its reluctance properly to confront the threat that it actually faces. Like Tony Blair, President Bush is desperate to avoid the idea that the world is currently convulsed by a 'clash of civilisations' between Islam and the west. Instead, those Islamists pledged to restore the Caliphate and destroy the hegemony of the west are said to be merely marginal fringe elements who have hijacked and corrupted a religion of peace. As a result, both leaders downplay the full extent of Islamist resurgence and hold out the prospect of reconciliation and rapprochement between Islam and the west. Hence President Bush's call the other day for Turkey to be admitted into the European Union:

' "Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the 'clash of civilisations' as a passing myth of history," Mr Bush said. He heaped praise on Turkey as a model for the cohabitation of democracy and Islam and said America believed that "as a European power, Turkey belongs in the European Union". He added: "Your membership would also be a crucial advance in relations between the Muslim world and the West because you are part of both. Fifteen years ago an artificial line that divided Europe - drawn at Yalta - was erased. Now this continent has the opportunity to erase another artificial division by fully including Turkey in the future of Europe." Tony Blair underlined Britain's support for Turkish membership. He did not directly refer to Mr Chirac's outburst but made a point of saying: "All of us have been impressed by the changes that have happened in Turkey. I look forward to Turkey taking its rightful place if this progress continues."'

This intervention was greeted with fury by France, which is resisting Turkey's accession to the EU. But France -- despite its utterly reprehensible role as chief weasel in the defence against terror -- is not necessarily wrong on this one. It is worth reading this sobering assessment by one of the world's foremost academic authorities on the Islamic world, Professor Raphael Israeli. He says Turkey's secularism furnishes only a 'thin veneer' under which Muslim sentiment is in ferment. Turkey's commitment to the west, he points out, is cracking. Its Islamist government not only refused to assist the coalition in last year's Iraq war, but has made overtures to Syria and Iran and sided with the Palestinians. Israeli writes:

'This is the context in which one has to see the revived debate about the entrance of Turkey into the European Union. Right are those heads of the Union, like Kohl, Giscard, and Berlusconi, who shun this union of Middle Eastern Muslims with Europe which is still essentially Western, if not practically Christian. Their fears are well-founded: if to their 400 million basically Europeans, Westerners, and Christians they add another 60 million Muslims, part of whom do not seek adaptation to the West but transformation thereof, then we are in for a great clash of cultures and friction between traditions, rather than a harmony that multi-ethnic societies could ideally produce, but unfortunately seldom do.

'The recent Bosnia and Kosovo wars and the tremendous hazards that the 25 millions Muslims already in Europe present to the local peace, ought to be more than a warning. Obviously, that threat is not universal, for many of the Muslims who settled in Europe went either to seek asylum from the tyrannies in their home countries or to look for better job opportunities. But not a few of them have aligned with the fundamentalists among them, who seem to hold the leadership in many localities, notably France and Belgium.

'Thus, whatever the official ''pretexts'' of certain European members of the European Union in their rejection of accepting Turkey in their midst, the truth is that they fear the effect of close to 20% Muslim population in Europe, should Turkey join. Due to their rapid demographic growth, they may double their percentage within the population within a few decades, and if they insist like the Muslim fundamentalists now already established on altering Europe, this may spell out trouble.'

One suspects that Bush's cosy view of Turkey owes much to the influence of our syncretic Prime Minister. For Blair is animated by the utopian fantasy that all religions are pretty much the same, really, and if we could only emphasise what we all have in common, guys, instead of dwelling on the rubbish that divides us like, er... well, beliefs, history and tradition and irrelevant things like that, all division and war will be ended.

Bush depends on Blair for obvious reasons. They both despise France and the EU, for obvious reasons. But the Bush administration should realise that Blair's ahistorical, ignorant 'one world' idealism amounts to a soup of soggy thinking in which the west will surely drown.